Paul Keating
’s public persona as an urban design expert perplexes admirers who share his view of himself as the great moderniser of the Australian economy while he was Labor treasurer. These days, Keating often yearns for cities unspoilt by “modernist" architecture that he sees as dedicated to “the making of money" rather than beautiful cites. But he can support the construction of towering commercial buildings in public spaces, if asked to approve the final design.

Although he lacks formal training, Keating has carved out an influential role in major urban developments, thanks to key planning appointments and the media’s delight in quoting his savage attacks on award-winning designers who don’t share his aesthetic views. In a typical attention-grabbing speech in 2006, Keating set out what remain his core design themes. He criticised “rapacious" property entrepreneurs such as Meriton’s
Harry Triguboff
for spreading the “disfiguring eczema" of modernism and accused modernist architects of “knowing nothing about colour". Outdoor advertising was “a creeping cancer".

An admirer of Keating’s economic record said in a lead article in the online Catallaxy Files: “Tell me this [speech] doesn’t sound like the rantings of lifelong dole bludger and Luddite Prince Charles." Keating, however, long claimed to possess exceptional aesthetic qualities. In 1988, he said that when he’d finished with a piece of music, “Everything nourishing is gone from it and is in me . . . Others listen, I am doing something else."

After a landslide loss as prime minister in the 1996 election, Keating set up a business consultancy drawing on his political experience. He also scored advisory roles that let him to impose his own taste on huge urban developments. A former NSW Labor government appointed him to head the “design excellence review panel" for the $6 billion redevelopment of former docklands land at Barangaroo, the 22-hectare harbour-front site alongside Sydney’s central business district.

Vandalism of the straight line

Keating rejected the winning entry in an international design competition, partly because it retained what he called “the ’60s vandalism, the straight line" of the Barangaroo wharves. The replacement design to restore his desired pre-industrial look required the creation of two curved coves that would reportedly chew up almost two hectares and cost as much as $250 million.

Unlike the winning design from a group led by
Philip Thalis
, Keating insisted the site’s widely admired sandstone cliffs must be covered, as they were partly man-made. The new design added a wharf with an offshore hotel, both absent from the original landscape. But Keating described its aesthetic appeal as providing an “exclamation mark". When ABC journalist Quentin Dempster asked about his aesthetic consistency after he described the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf development as an “excrescence of the face of Sydney", Keating replied, “I can’t teach you taste, Quentin."

The incoming NSW Coalition government scrapped the offshore hotel, but gave
James Packer
’s Crown group the nod for a casino at Barangaroo. Keating objected to the casino being built on land reserved for civic purposes. After Packer asked him in 2013 to pick the best new design, Keating enthused about its location on what was supposed to be a harbourside park and its increased in height from 170 metres to 275 metres.

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Several designers, including Thalis, noted the contrast with Keating’s brutal attack in early April on a draft master plan to improve Sydney’s Botanic Gardens and nearby parklands. The plan included a new four-storey hotel, invisible from the Gardens and almost so from the parklands containing the Art Gallery whose director Keating slammed as a “property tart". Keating called the plan an “atrocity" that would cater for the “greedy and crass tourism industry" and commercialise a “gift of nature" from governors Phillip and Macquarie. The Garden’s director
Kim Ellis
pointed out that the professionally designed plan didn’t commercialise the gardens. Yet Keating was still angered by the plan’s replacement of a temporary sound shell in the parklands with a permanent one, although it has a similar location to the Myer Music Bowl enjoyed by Melburnians for 60 years.

Form over function

Keating’s attack reflected his personal opinion about how these places should look – barely changed from 200 years ago – rather than how well they function. The internationally renowned landscape architect
Perry Lethlean
told this paper: “The role and function of these parks is more about a place where we come together to meet, to socialise and participate in events, rather than in the past when they were to escape the city." As well as large parts of Barangaroo, Keating can favour commercialism elsewhere. While prime minister, he effectively let News Ltd build commercial facilities in Moore Park, although it was another of Governor Macquarie’s “gifts of nature". Keating earlier said of his property developer friend
Warren Anderson
, “Anyone who’s put $1.5 billion worth of concrete and steel on the ground, they’ve done a lot for this country. I like the goers. As far as I’m concerned wimps are out." He later called other entrepreneurs “spivs" whose profligacy he said caused the 1990-91 recession when unemployment hit almost 11 per cent.

The main problem was Keating’s belief in his unrivalled skill at “pulling the levers" in a mechanistic economy. He was too slow to lift interest rates, then kept them too high for too long. He still insists he knew best. Just as he now does with urban design.